James Carroll has a column today in the Boston Globe concerning the dire financial sitution in Ireland--"the worst crisis in our history," says the Irish finance minister.
He notes the remark of one of the protesters in Dublin last week who worried about the brutal austerity measures that would “turn the working people of this country into serfs.’’ Serfdom, Carroll says, has been the lot of the Irish people until just recently.
Yet only yesterday serfdom was the near universal condition of the Irish nation. The epic 19th-century famine, which cut the population in half through death and emigration, can be said to have ended only in 2005, which is when the population finally returned to the level of 1861.
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